Rainbows and Rain
by Sera dy Relandrant
Summary: Then at the end, your dream will come true. A pot of gold awaiting all just for you." Gabrielle Delacour chases the wrong rainbow. Asteria Malfoy knows and fears the power of dreams. Blaise Zabini can’t wait for the end. Ménage à trois.


**Summary: **_"Then at the end, your dream will come true. A pot of gold awaiting all just for you." Gabrielle Delacour chases the wrong rainbow. Asteria Malfoy knows and fears the power of dreams. Blaise Zabini can't wait for the end. ____Ménage____à______trois. _

_199__8…_

_I sat high upon the hill of green__  
__watching ivory clouds drift by,__  
__lost in dreams of fantasy__  
__when his flutter caught my eye._

She sees him through a rainbow the first time.

Twelve-year-old Gabrielle Delacour is curled up on the broad marble lip of one of the fountains scattered across the grounds of the Acquarones' summer villa. The only thing on her mind is her most recent heartbreak. Her knees drawn up to her chest, unmindful of her candy-cane-striped knickers flashing out from underneath her skirt, she thinks angrily, _Boys are stupid_. For a tantalizing moment, Ciro Acquarone's wicked black eyes flash in her mind and once again she can feel the softness of his lips on hers, can smell his familiar citrus-flavored shampoo. Then the tears come and wiping vainly at her eyes, she berates herself for her stupidity.

_Fleur__ was right when she said he was far too old for me! I was a fool, an enfant, to believe that he meant anything at all when he said he loved me… Mon Dieu, he's sixteen – what could he have ever seen in a silly little second-year like me? _

"Ciao giovane signorina."

She jumps and tumbles into the fountain. Vaguely she hears something that sounds like a violent curse (though she can't be too sure, she knows precious little Italian except for the occasional cuss-word she's picked up from the Acquarone children), as a pair of arms grasp her elbows and pull her out of the frothing water.

A blazing wave of sunlight streaks her eyelids as the sun emerges brilliantly – and unnecessarily – at just that moment from the clouds that have swirled the clear Italian blue sky with white. It renders her temporarily blind and she gasps as she tries to open them again. Multi-colored sunspots so large that they merge into a solid band of variegated color, a dazzling rainbow, dance in front of her.

The man, whose form she can just see hazily – just enough to estimate that he's certainly someone she's never seen before – presses the tip of his wand to her arm and before she knows it, she's almost completely dry again. "_Merci_," she murmurs when she can finally crack her eyes open, fiddling with her stiff, high, embroidered collar.

The first thing she sees clearly is the young man. Lean, dark – not golden-dark and tanned from years spent under the light of the burning sun riding Hippogriffs and playing Quidditch like the Acquarone boys, but black-dark, beautifully so – and incredibly handsome even with his somber eyes and unsmiling lips.

"_He… he was magnificent, Dr __Ganguly." _

She's twelve and she's just lost a boyfriend, a boyfriend she now decides was ugly enough to be lost. Could Ciro Acquarone ever hope to compete with this mystifyingly gorgeous paragon of masculine beauty? This dark Eros? _Oh my god he's so hot!! _The inner fangirl in her roars in lust but outside she's still the shy, shambling twelve-year-old girl, the type who'd never, _never _have the nerve to walk up to a guy so much older than her and coo into his ear, "I think you're cute." She's just not Fleur.

"_Fleur and I were… well we were close and distant at the same time. __She loved me but I don't think she ever really understood me – I mean, I was so much younger than her, we hardly ever got to know eachother except during vacations." _

"Oh…" he says, sizing her up quickly and estimating that she's not Italian. Then he switches rapidly to English – _Brit_ English no less. Sexy voice, sexy accent. Very sexy. Mmm… it's a wonder, she thinks, that she's not already drooling. "Are you alright now? Miss-?"

"Delacour," she mumbles, shuffling her feet nervously. Cotton-candy pink sandals. God how immature! He must think her a child. "Gabrielle Delacour."

He didn't even spare a glance for her feet, so childishly decked out in cotton-candy-colored sandals, over which she was in agonies of embarrassment. "Ah… so you're related to Antoinette then?"

"She's my auntie," Gabrielle says shyly, hoping he'll ask her something else. Something more personal.

"My mother's stepmother," he says uninterestedly. He shoots a longing glance at the fountain, at the willowy crabapple tree bending over it and the soft summer blossoms, ranging in tint from creamy white to shell pink, drifting lazily across the glassy surface of the pool. It's a beautiful spot, far enough away from the villa to give one the feeling of lovely seclusion and the privacy so rare in the huge, crammed-to-bursting main buildings – the Acquarone clan believe in the concept of joint families with a vengeance. Close by the long white wall cutting off the estate from the village loops across the mint-green grass and beyond that, one can just catch a glimpse of the divinely blue Mediterranean Sea and the little skiffs with their red-and-white sails skimming across it, can just hear the call of the seagulls and smell salty brine.

"I used to sit here quite often and just think," he says with marked emphasis. "I haven't been here in ages – just arrived today in fact from London."

She realizes at once what he means. "Oh of course," she says, in her heavily accented English. "I'll just… I mean…" And she scampers off hastily. He doesn't even spare a glance for her retreating back – she's just a little girl to him, she realizes with a sickening humiliation that makes her blush for her presumption. _Did you even think he'd notice you, you little fool? _

Back in the villa, she curls up on the window-seat and stares unseeingly at the panorama of the green, sun-touched hills bending low to kiss the lapping blue ocean waves. Maman and Tante Antoinette chat, occasionally looking at her bemusedly – "Why aren't you playing with Ciro and the other children, _mon coeur_?" "Do you think you're coming down with a touch of something, _tesoruccio_?" But for the most part they leave her alone to brood over handsome young men who are too old for her.

"Emperatriz and her son arrived today from London," Tante Antoinette tells Maman and Gabrielle's ears immediately prick up in interest.

"Emperatriz…" Maman's brow creases in thought, like she's trying to remember the name. "Emperatriz Acquarone? I don't seem to recall…"

"Amadeo's oldest daughter," Tante says, referring to her husband. A frosty smile chills her face as she adds, "My lovely, lovely stepdaughter."

Recollection floods Maman's face. "You don't mean to say… that creature who dispatched of her husbands in… well I never! The _nerve _of it…" Her voice trails off in angry grumbles. The sun, filtering through the windows is warm on Gabrielle's bare legs as she leans forward, eagerly drinking up her mother's words.

_Emperatriz Acquarone? Who is she? Why does Maman… why it's a mystery, isn't it? _

Her imagination afire she tries to guess how this strange Emperatriz – surely the mother of the handsome young man – 'dispatched' of her husbands. There's a dark glamour to the name, corresponding to the dark beauty of the man by the fountain. Just like something in a storybook.

"He's quite a handsome fellow, that son of hers," Tante continues. "Blaise Zabini. Educated at Hogwarts, just like his father – yes, you remember that perfect despot in the English Ministry, Cyprian Zabini don't you? – I hear he's been mixing with the wrong crowd over at your end. You know what I mean."

_The Death Eaters, _Gabrielle understands and a shiver of pleasurable fear crawls up her spine. Yes she remembers the Death Eaters from Fleur's frenzied letters last year perfectly well.

"Bad blood will out in the end," Maman says ominously. "With a mother like Madame – well I'm sure I don't remember her surname now, she's had ever so many of them… I want nothing to do with the boy."

_But I do, _Gabrielle thinks to herself. _I wish I had something to do with him. _Wishes have an ugly way of coming around though and many years later, after all the bright rainbows have faded into the rain, she will remember with pain the fervent wish she made as a twelve-year-old.

_2003…_

"It'll be fun!" Diane insists, and drags Gabrielle away from the enormous books she's practically lived in throughout the summer, in preparation for the Higher Secondary Examinations she'll be taking next year when she graduates. She doesn't know what makes her agree but she lets her best friend drag her away – all the time protesting though – and enter her in the local beauty pageant. It's a welcome break from all the studying and she rather likes the catcalls and wolf-whistles that greet her as she prances down the makeshift runway in her skimpy sling-bikini (she lives in perpetual fear that Maman will one day discover that little scrap of floral-printed cloth, hidden in the back of her closet).

At seventeen, Gabrielle is beautiful. _Mermaid_-beautiful one might say with her almost ethereal features and magnolia-white skin, so alien to the kiss of the open sun (it's just the way her skin is though she doesn't like it, preferring a tan). Her eyes are dreamy, always a little faraway like she's thinking of something else, crystal green like the Mediterranean Sea on a perfect day, and her hair, darker than that of her mother and sister, is like spun gold, flowing down her shoulders in loose ringlets.

It's no surprise that she wins the pageant. What is a surprise – to herself no less than to others – is that she chooses to compete at the next round. And the next.

"How would I look like with the tiara of Miss France on my head?" she asks her mother softly one day. She has the sensation that she's playing a scene in a Muggle film – her declamation is just so… drama-ish. Not natural. Made-for-a-movie.

"Like a princess," her mother says and takes her in her arms. "_Mon coeur_, you've grown up haven't you?" she adds later, a trifle wistfully.

The next day they leave for the Ministry of Magic in Paris, to create a new Muggle identity for Gabrielle at the Department of Trans-Species Interaction (_but Muggles are the same species as us, _Gabrielle thinks wryly). She skips her seventh year at Beauxbatons – though Fleur writes back ominously that that's really not a good idea, that she'll live to regret giving up her education so early, that a witch can never really fit into the Muggle world ("I've seen my father-in-law, Gabrielle, you don't know how backdated they are!") etc.

Gabrielle ignores her sister's advice for once and later, when she – or rather, Arielle Bellerose as she's now known as – stands in front of a crowd of thousands in a floor-length silk gown, a bouquet in her hands, the winner's crown on her head and the ceremonial sash looping from shoulder to hip, she thinks it's worth it.

_2004…_

They call her The Mermaid, partly because of her name – "Arielle, _mon ami_? Just like the Little Mermaid, no?" –, partly because of her face. She likes it, likes the old-fashionedness of the nickname, the irony (because of course the poor Muggles don't know how _real_ mermaids look like), the images that the word conjure. She's not the ethereal marble-white sea-flower that the media makes her out to be, but if the Muggles – who really aren't as backdated as Fleur believes them to be, she realizes when she discovers the internet – want to call her that, then well it's their choice.

Modeling agencies eagerly snap for her, but she goes in only for the highest of the high – Gucci and Givenchy, Vuitton and Prada, brands which were once so meaningless to her, still are to most of the people in her life. Life glitters beckoningly and, lost amidst the crazy parties and the champagne, the flashlights that throw an iridescent blaze (rose-tinted at the beginning) over everything, the beautiful, beautiful clothes and the men – oh the men! – she almost loses herself. That'seasy enough for an eighteen-year-old girl, sheltered for so long from the rest of the world, nurtured on the romantic ideals of the innocence and the trustworthiness of Muggles ("poor backward creatures, they're not as conniving and deceitful as us nasty wizards, bless their dear little souls!")

She learns how her career depends on her ability to balance on fashionable skyscrapers and keep her weight down to eight stones and just how cruel that young Adonis who was serenading her the night before can be if he feels that she's not worth his time. The edge of competition is fierce enough to cut, slicing through her like the keen edge of a blade that she's never been forced to feel – competition was always Fleur's field, goddamn Beauxbatons Champion, not _hers_.

She glides down the runway however, in diamond-studded bikinis, fanciful jodhpurs and lemon-tinted cocktail dresses with equal ease, seemingly oblivious to the flashbulbs going off right in front of her face, and she likes that part. She's a damn good model she knows with pride – _or I could just say I'm a damn good clothes' horse, _she thinks ironically too – but in her line of work that isn't the most important thing. What is important is the driving urge to get more, go further, go up, up, up… you have to want it enough to kill.

_Do I have that? _She thinks, pacing restlessly on the soft fur carpet of her apartment after she's slipped off her golden Jimmy Choos from her aching feet. _If I don't I shouldn't be sticking on here. _She's starving but she knows she can't eat now, her head hurts but she's got to go to get ready for yet another party in half-an-hour – too important to miss –, there's a long pile of letters on her desk from her family (she hasn't had the time for weeks to answer them). _Is it worth this? Is it? _

She looks helplessly out of the window of her nineteenth-storey apartment at the glittering multi-colored lights all around her. They're cold and she misses the warmth of the soft darkness, unpunctuated by so many pinpricks of light but ever so much friendlier, back home.

"_It was a pretty bad time for me, Dr Ganguly. I was just so… lonely then. I needed love, I was starving for it – not fro__m my parents, not from my friends. I needed an idyll to worship, to devote myself to. Does that make sense?" _

_2005…_

It's a black-and-white costume party and quaint, old-fashioned (to the point that it's become medieval) elegance rules the roost that night. Gabrielle likes it, likes the soft glow of the tapers flickering in their fine silver candelabras, the gentler scents of violet and vanilla borne by the sedate murmurs of conversation (the conversation thankfully, blissfully is sedate tonight), the graceful ribbons of bluish-grey smoke that thread the air, the ivory lace and the old pearls, the unembellished black velvet, the prettiness of it, stark and simple but so soothing to her jarred senses.

She doesn't notice the young woman at once, lost in the crowd of faces. But then she's there in front, a reed-slim young thing just about her own age, with a fresh, daintily oval face with surprisingly bright leaf-green eyes and glossy waves of smooth caramel-brown hair falling prettily around her. _Charmante. _"I don't believe we've been introduced before," the young woman murmurs, half-shyly, a curiously eager look on her face. "Asteria Greengrass – Mrs Solberg's niece, I think you know her."

Gabrielle nods, wondering who in the fashion world doesn't know Angelica Solberg, socialite and style goddess. She remembers Solberg's elder niece too – Daphne, haughty, blonde and freezingly elegant.

"You're a Veela," Asteria whispers, leaning forwards. "A trained witch too." And those words cement their friendship.

They tryst together on an old settee with tasseled black silk cushions, hidden behind the high palm trees arranged gracefully around the ballroom, sipping their tequilas and exchanging histories. "I know when I saw you at once, Arielle," Asteria explains. "I can sense magic… there was just something about you. And then of course you're far too beautiful to be well, quite human."

"I'm a mermaid," Gabrielle laughs wryly, continuing the conversation in English. "Is your aunt a…"

"Goodness no," Asteria shakes her head. "Muggleborn, just like mother. Father's a Squib, he and she met at their posh boarding school and well, you know childhood sweethearts and the whole deal. Soulmates."

"You believe in it?" Gabrielle asks dryly. Perhaps it's all the alcohol – she drinks to keep pretty little Asteria company, drinks beyond caution – that makes her light-headed. Or perhaps it's excitement at meeting another witch that makes her reveal so much. A sense of togetherness with this girl she's never met before. "I used to – when I was about twelve. Then Ciro dumped me… well I suppose it makes sense now. He was sixteen, I was just some silly kid, quarter-Veela yes, but still rather er, innocent, simply not worth his time, you know."

"Older man?" Asteria chuckles. "Same thing here. Blaise is four years older than me but…" She smiles mysteriously. "You must meet him someday, Arielle, he's simply... well words can't describe him."

_Yes, words can't describe you can they? _Gabrielle thinks when she rings the bell of Asteria's swanky London apartment and it's opened by a man she can very well recollect. He reels back in surprise when he sees her and says, "Antoinette?"

"Her niece," Gabrielle says wanly.

"_Ah… so you're related to Antoinette then?"_

"_She's my auntie," Gabrielle says shyly, hoping he'll ask her something else. Something more personal. _

"_My mother's stepmother," he says uninterestedly._

Tall, lean, dark the very prototype of classically masculine, sun-caressed Italian beauty. Only today the somber light in his eyes, the mysterious brooding romance that seemed to hang about him the last they saw eachother is missing. It's been replaced by a crooked little smile, the barest hint of a dimple and just a certain, well… brightness. _Seduction thou art in the air, _she thinks ominously as Asteria laughingly introduces her as 'Arielle Bellerose' (the name Gabrielle now prefers to go by) and wriggles the little hoop of pearls around her ring finger tantalizingly in Gabrielle's face. Gabrielle doesn't blame her – in Asteria's place, with such a fiancé she would most likely do the same.

All the same she can't help but think vaguely at Blaise Zabini's choice of engagement ring. _Pearls for mourning_, she's heard often enough from her grandmother.

The apartment is lovely, furnished in Asteria's airy, graceful style – "I'm a Gemini, naturally my taste borders on the illusive". Swinging curtains made entirely of swarovski crystals and mirrors held by marble cupids, translucent drapes of ivory silk and fresh tuberoses in tiny glass bowls, that sort of thing. But today, even in the clear light of day, when all things are at their brightest and freshest, Gabrielle feels constrained.

It's stifling, stagnating, with him only a few feet away from her, pretending that he's not looking at her – she pretends that he isn't too, only sometimes their eyes meet and they both look away quickly, he not blushing because he's too dark, she not because she's been too trained to, by the modeling world –, Asteria chattering away blithely all the while, so oblivious and the crystal curtains chiming to the tune of the breeze that blows in from the high windows. She meets Asteria again and again though she has to remind herself more than once that they're friends and that friends don't steal eachother's fiancés.

_But__ I'm not stealing, I'm not doing anything wrong, _she thinks bewilderedly while she's reminding herself, _A few words, a few glances – he is handsome – what's there to that? _

A few words have a way of running into sentences when Gabrielle begins to visit when Asteria's away – "Oh I'm so sorry, I didn't know she wasn't at home now" "No problem, won't you have a drink while you're here?" "Oh no really, I, well of course if you insist…" Sentences turn into exchanged addresses and addresses into little dinner-dates where all mention of Asteria and the upcoming wedding is scrupulously avoided and then it all comes to a head one day at a wizarding restaurant with too much alcohol and too little food.

"_Damn my diet for everything that happened – if I'd had more to eat I guess I wouldn't have been so light-headed. Fatalities of a model's life, doctor_._"_

He 'explains' the next morning, and she believes him because she wants to (later of course, months later she berates herself for her stupidity). "I'm not good enough for Teri," he says quietly, looking soulfully into her eyes with his velvety black ones. "Asteria and I, we've never exactly been compatible. Truth is, I could never give her up, she always clung to me like a kid, I didn't want to break her poor heart. But now," stroking her hair softly, so softly, "after I met you, I realized that she and I weren't…"

"Weren't…?" Gabrielle whispers, not daring to believe, her heart beating quickly.

He completes the sentence, but not in words. The next day when she goes to meet Asteria with Blaise – he insists on it, saying it's only the proper thing to do – she keeps the memory of his kisses forming their own words on her collarbones, the way his fingers traced the letters over her back. It's the only way she can bear the look on Asteria's face as she hurls the pretty hoop of pearls into her face and spits on her Prada mules.

"_I knew it was __inexcusable of me. But I didn't care then." _

_2006…_

Quite honestly she has no idea how the next six months spirit by. She's bewitched, enchanted, captivated (to the point that she later suspects the sustained use of Amortentia on his part) and madly, madly in love.

He doesn't work. "I write," is the only thing he'll say on the subject, a sly little smirk on his face. She honestly doesn't _care_, and lets him live off her.

He delves generously into her bank account. She protests a little, but her murmurs are silenced as they lie side by side on the wet grass, making love under the starry night sky.

He asks her to give up her 'vulgar' job. She gives up without a fight.

"_Doesn't that show how much of a hold he had over me? I might have been lonely but still I was pretty OK with the way my life was going – good money and we always had __a ton of silly fun before shows and at the parties and stuff." _

He slaps her one day, unprovoked. She slaps him right back. He leaves her apartment instantly, contempt on his elegantly-chiseled features. She pretends she doesn't care and cries herself to sleep. But when he returns the next morning, with a bouquet and a look of feigned penitence on his face – even she can see it's feigned, but now she's too desperate, too wild to do anything about it – she accepts him with open arms.

He demands that she stop visiting Fleur so often. She acquiesces without a second thought.

He locks her up in the dungeon of the crumbling stone manor he's inherited from his father, on the wild, lonely purple moor for two days. He has only to kiss her and apologize for her to willingly forgive him.

He demands, quite suddenly, one day that they visit Fleur and Bill. Not at Shell Cottage, no. At the Weasleys' Burrow, no less. "I want to see how those filthy animals frolic in the mud," is all the explanation he'll offer her. But first he decorates her for the occasion, her first meeting with Fleur in over three months. She wears a strapless, knee-length dress, candy-pink like the childish sandals she'd agonized over when she was twelve.

Over her arms and marble-white shoulders he paints his own graffiti, monstrous bruises, purple and blue-black, mottled a sickly yellow, green even, at their centers. _Like flowers_, she thinks, stiff and wincing from the pain as she stuffs her pack of Bensons – _guess I'm turning into a chain smoker, _she thinks, with no hint of the horror she would have felt at this fact when she was twelve, when smoking, to her, was the deadliest of sins – into her pearl-hemmed clutch. But today she's _proud_, absurdly bizarrely proud. Of the cigarettes which he'd – not modeling, though smoking and staying stick-thin did seem to go hand in hand in that industry – taught her about. Of the bruises which showed that he loved her enough to mark her.

"_It was sick, sick how I loved him. For a long time I thought he had me, uh drugged." _

It's that pride that buoys her all through the painful meeting at The Burrow. The stares. The fleeting glances at eachother. Puckered foreheads. The cold voices and the strained courtesy. _Damn you, _she thinks, nervously fiddling with her clutch as she catches Harry's glance for a fraction of a second, feels the condemnation. _Damn you all to hell. _

She plays with little, red-haired Nicky – Dominique – an exquisite porcelain doll at six, with her mother's intense blue eyes and her auntie's marble-white skin and watches Victoire romping across the lawn with Teddy Lupin. It's better staying with the children than with that uncouth dragoness who claims to be sweet, gentlemanly Bill's mother and his bat-crazy, repulsive sister. _Animals_, she thinks with disgust and the flush of shame reddens her pale cheeks as she watches Mrs Weasley, Ginevra, Ron, Harry, Hermione and George cluster around Blaise – sharp-tongued, bitter, disparaging, and withering.

He bears it all with equanimity, the way a gentleman should.

The only thing that makes her happy that day is when darling Ginevra – her pendulous, hideously-shaped breasts and tyre-thick stomach sagging even in the first trimester of her third pregnancy – waddles up to her and demands, a puckered frown making her pig-like face uglier than ever what she means by bringing Blaise here. "He was hand-in-hand with the Death Eaters during the Second War," she hisses, "It's a disgrace, Gabrielle Jacqueline-Marie Delacour." Ginevra has always known how much she hates her middle-name, hates the pretentiousness of it, and consequently, being Ginevra has used it whilst addressing her since she's been eleven.

"_She hated my sister for marrying Bill – whenever that cunt wasn't calling Fleur Phlegm she was calling her the French prostitute. __Said the same thing about me and I was eleven then – can't you see why I never liked her?" _

Gabrielle pulls out a cigarette from her pearl-hemmed clutch, lights it with the little Oriental, jade lighter Blaise last bought for her ("Lovely things those odd little Muggles make, don't you think? After all lovely, frivolous, expensive pleasures are the only ones worth having") and takes a long drag. She exhales and blows a spiral of grey-blue smoke right into Ginevra's face. The woman coughs.

"I wouldn't know about such things as disgrace would I?" she murmurs. "I'm just a revolting little French bird who'll grow up to be as filthy a whore as my sister." And she smiles coldly into Ginevra Potter's face. "You told me that when I was eleven and when I dared smile at your fiancé."

And she sweeps out, leaving her to splutter in fury. Blaise doesn't mention the Weasleys afterwards, but he begins to make plans – plans for her to meet his mother. Emperatriz. The dark beauty. Gabrielle thinks it's another step in their relationship. It isn't, as she discovers at Emperatriz's upscale villa.

"Veela." Emperatriz spits out the word as though it were no better than 'whore' or more likely, 'half-breed'. And then without a second glance at Gabrielle she sweeps out, onto the sun-drenched terrace. Blaise looks after her for a moment, indefinable emotion in his eyes, shrugs and drags Gabrielle upstairs. And the next day a letter arrives for her, a cruel, cruel letter that makes her stand quite still in her apartment, gasp in disbelief and then collapse into an armchair, crying. Crying for hours.

_Dear Gabrielle, _

_You're a pretty girl and I'm sure you'll have no trouble attracting men who won't mind having one-eighth Veela children. I'm not one of them._

_Kisses, _

_Blaise _

At first she thinks it's a mistake, that it can't be her Blaise. She writes to him, a light, little letter treating his former one as a joke. Disbelief and something akin to terror marks the part between the lines.

_Mademoiselle Delacour,_

_If my last letter was too evasive, I hope this one will not be. I wish to break off all contact with you – is that understood? Kindly do not waste my time with your frivolous epistles. _

_Adieu, _

_Blaise Cyprian Zabini _

She crumples the letter, the smooth creamy parchment, into a tight ball and flings it with all the force she has at the wall. Then she throws a coat about her shoulders, unconscious, uncaring of the fact that she's still in her pajamas, and Apparates out of her apartment, right into his. She knows that he's not there, that he's never at home this time, and she simply loses her mind. Perhaps it's excusable, perhaps it's not.

Wood, marble, glass – she doesn't care what's in her path. She has a wand and for the first time in her life she actually uses it for something destructive. She feels like a Goddess of Vengeance – one of the Furies perhaps, or would it be Fates? – as she wrecks and destroys and damages and breaks and tears and shatters. All in all she enjoys herself immensely and when she leaves – after how long? – her wrongs do not weigh at all on her conscience, because he deserved it. Years later, she still believes he deserved it.

The next day he sends her the bill.

"_Well I guess it turned out OK in the end. I never would have auditioned for Chanson de cygnet if he hadn't dumped me." _

**A/N: To be continued… shortly. **


End file.
